Dr Hermes Reviews - THE SPIDER

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THE SPIDER STRIKES!

(Nov 20, 2002)

From October 1933, this was the first story introducing Richard Wentworth and his febrile world. Written by R.T.M. Scott, it's a more traditional and reasonable example of masked avenger stuff than the genuinely apocalyptic nightmares that Norvell Page was later to write (under the "Grant Stockbridge" name) which most fans think of when the Spider is mentioned. And yet, all the hints are there are of the themes which Page and his colleagues would later develop.

For one thing, the main villain (called Mr X for the first part of the book) is a relatively ordinary master criminal, a master of disguise and subterfuge, not a monstrous fiend who slays thousands without hesitation. Still, he IS planning to pump poison gas into a bank to make its robbery easy, so he's no genteel jewel thief, either.

And although Wentorth has not adopted his familiar Lon Chaney-style disguise of the fright wig, beaky nose and fangs he will use as the hunchbacked Tito Caliepi (the idea that the Spider has a fake secret identity is pretty funny), there is a foreshadowing of this. At one point, he puts on a simple veiled mask, but near the end (when he knows he will be seen) he pauses to yank on a torn, discarded black coat and straw hat. ("One of his shoulders seemed to lower. Out upon the roof he hobbled, skipped and jumped - a horrible scarecrow of a man. The Spider was attacking.") So right from the beginning, the idea of the Spider appearing grotesque in his public appearances is evident.

The inspiration from the Shadow is never more clearly seen than in the early chapter where he yanks a despondent young man back from a suicidal plunge. True, he doesn't recruit the guy to become an agent, but this is still a bit blatant.
The way the Spider was portrayed on the covers of his pulp, as a dramatic figure with hat and cloak, 45s in hand, rather than as the unsavory Tito, may just possibly have been done with the idea of perhaps snatching up a few Shadow fans.

Scott presents Wentworth as much cooler, less introspective and confliced than the version which Page popularized. Under Page, our hero suffers immense anxiety, doubt and guilt; his emotional state was as much as part of the story as the action. In this first adventure, Wentworth has only a twinge here and there of vulnerabilty. For the most part, he's cool and confident.

Right from the start, though, the character seems determined to make his crusade as risky as possible. Instead of the Zorro or Bruce Wayne strategy of posing as a meek playboy. Wentworh might as well be the Spider even as his public self. He openly pursues criminals for his own satisfaction, makes no secret about shooting it out with them, and seems to put his Spider emblem on his victim's foreheads just to make it more difficult on himself. On board a ship at sea, he challenges a crooked gambler and in the inevitable fight, drills a bullet into the guy. Then he plants his Spider emblem on the corpse... making sure everyone knows he's on the same boat as the mysterious killer.

To make things trickier, he leaves the ocean liner by plane and arrives back in New York, and when he invitably finds himself gunning down some crooks, he puts the little red emblem on their cold foreheads while the Spider is ostensibly still at sea! Jeeez, Richard, you wonder why Commissioner Fitzpatrick suspects you're the Spider. Wentworth really seems to enjoy putting himself in as much chance of being caught as possible. There's a good deal of detail about the suspicous cigarette lighter where he carries the seals being inspected by the police and his tricking them with slight of hand, but you have to conclude that Wentworth really enjoys being an inch away from getting caught.

The first book introduces the full supporting cast. Ram Singh is already at his master's side, a Hindu with a Sikh name and an eagerness to throw knives. Nita Van Sloan is a perfect partner for Wentworth, just as quick thinking and ready for trouble as her soul mate. She decoys Kirkpatrick at a crucial moment on her own initiative, sees through a ruse to lure her to a kidnapping, and has no hesitation about scooping up a dropped gun and brandishing it at just the right moment. The huge faithful dog Apollo is at her side, and he would be sorely missed in later issues (and yet, the Great Dane does make it a bit too difficult for enemies to abduct Nita, something plots will often require).

The first two Spider books by Scott are too often glossed over as false starts which aren't truly repesentative of the direction the series took. And yet, they deserve more credit than that. They laid the groundwork upon which the books grew progressively more overheated and hyperactive, and they make a nice introduction to the basic setup. THE SPIDER STRIKES! is definitely worth checking out for a fan of the series who hasn't seen how it all began. It's a fun read, as well.

THE WHEEL OF DEATH (Jan 4, 2003) From November 1933, this was the second (and last) issue of THE SPIDER which R.T.M. Scott wrote, before Norvell W. Page took over and sent the character careening through apocalyptic disasters for the following decade. If Scott had stayed at the typewriter and the following stories had been like this one, it's not likely the Spider would have lasted very long or be fondly remembered today. (Of course, I can't explain the Phantom Detective's long healthy run, either.) THE WHEEL OF DEATH is okay, with some nice scenes (I like the way our hero locks a thug up in Grant's Tomb to get him out of the way for a while) and a decent finale, but it's not really memorable. There's a long involved sequence in a nightclub full of trick elevators and everyone sneaking around, which goes on way too long. The story's main drawback is that its villain is a rather ordinary gangster, using Dan Grogan's sleazy restaurant as a front for his sorta decadent nightclub (gambling, jazz, naked hostesses, a little dope, you know the type of place). An innocent man is sentenced to be executed and Wentworth intervenes because the guy's girlfriend has pleaded with him. The investigation and the action following have their moments, but they don't really make a strong impression. Halfway through, I had to stop and remember why the Spider was after this mastermind anyway. (The idea that politicians are being systematically ensnared by drugs and prostitutes falls flat. As if they need to be enticed.) Scott gives us some background on Richard Wentworth (his father had been killed in WW I "in the same battle in which he, himself, had been seriously wounded"). And Wentworth has apparently always been a thrill seeking playboy, "engaged in adventurous enterprises in far away countries" or working with the police as a consultant. The idea of establishing a smokescreen as a meek, peaceable fop like Bruce Wayne or Don Diego never occurs to him. He's pretty much the Spider all the time. In an odd moment, when Commissioner Kirkpatrick has that confounded cigarette lighter to examine (again), it's been gimmicked to leave little red seals that say "NYPD" rather than the Spider emblem. Kirkpatrick seems to think this is amusing. (Hey, Dick, here's an idea... since the Commissioner is so convinced by now that you're carrying the Spider seals in your lighter that he doesn't even bother to search your clothing, how about carrying the seals somewhere else. Maybe in your wristwatch or something? Keep him poring over every inch of that lighter and walk around with a dozen Spider seals all over you.) And Nita van Sloan, as much as I admire her courage and resourcefulness, has a dark kinky side to her, as well. In a small elevator, standing on top of a corpse which has been shot through the eye by Wentworth, and which is now wearing the Spider sign on its still warm cheek, she and her man start smooching. They get into it enough that he forgets his directions for a second and she finally breaks loose. ( " 'Dick!' she protested impishly. 'Don't you think we could find a more appropriate place?' ") These kids today....

WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH (Dec 7, 2002) From December 1933, this was the first of the Spider novels written by Norvell Page, after the first two by R.T.M. Scott. It's a nice blend of the two authors' styles, with Page not immediately getting into the overheated mode he would later make the trademark of the series for most fans. In a year or two, Page would be writing in such a frenzied, emotional style that he often seemed to forget what he had written earlier in the same book and contradict himself, or appear to be furiously making it up as he went along. In WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, he spends a little more care crafting the plot and building suspense, with great results. There are clues presented to the identity of the mastermind, which the hero figures out and uses to his advantage in the best mystery tradition. The final few chapters are terrific, a tight sequence of confrontation, capure and escape and showdown, that zip right along. At one point, Nita and Wentworth are tied up with Apollo nearby, drugged. As soon as the Great Dane awakens, he will drink from a water bowl containing plague germs and then go over to chew the ropes to free his masters, dooming both of them. If they order the dog away, they will survive and eventually escape, but the villain will get away to strike again. So it's Nita who calls the faithful Apollo over. The whole series of Spider novels is filled with nerve-wracking moments. From the very first story, we find it is not enough for Richard Wentworth to simply lead a double life as the Spider, killing criminals he thinks the police can't handle. No, he insists on putting a seal on the dead crook's forehead of a tiny red spider, and he insists on doing this even when the cops are kicking the door in and there's no way out of the room. Right at the start of this case, he sneaks out of a party where his lady is dancing with Commissioner Fitzpatrick, breaks into a fence's shop and shoots the man dead so he can look for clues to a crime he THINKS might be in the making, and rushes back to make an appearance at the party again. But this is all too easy for Wentworth. He immediately mentions to Kirkpatrick that the Spider is supposed to be back in action soon, just before the police come rushing up to tell their boss about the murder. What the heck is it with this guy? Even his partner Nita asks "why must you always stir up Kirkpatrick?", why keep getting as close to being caught as possible, and Wentworth blithely replies, "But my dear, there must be some zest to life." There's no sign that deep down he wants to be captured and punished, but he sure enjoys coming as close as possible. I imagine it's the same adrenalin rush that test pilots or skydivers get from seeing just how far they can push it and survive. The villain this time is called the Black Death, and for good reason. He has developed a new strain of bubonic plague that develops instantly, kills its victims in horrible agony within a few hours, and which cannot be treated by the existing serums. Right off the bat, he lets us know what a vile fiend he is by exposing two adorable little moppets to an infected pooch, and sure enough the kids perish miserably. The demands for extortion money from the Black Death escalate, and before you know it, hundreds of people are dying in clusters, they're burning corpses on Ellis Island, the stores and offices are closing down, Manhattan is under martial law, and it's a typical Spider catastrophe in the making. The friendship between Wentworth and Kirkpatrick is the most agonizing relationship I have ever seen in pulp fiction. The Commissioner must KNOW Wentworth is the Spider (c'mon, the guy practically yells it from the rooftops), but because the vigilante has confined himself to plugging bullets into crooks the law couldn't reach, Kirkpatrick struggles to find reasons to let him go free. There is a lot of scenes involving Kirkpatrick tensely searching Wentworth's lighter for the Spider seals, but this is just a symbolic way of showing the Commisioner trying to find a way to justify his not throwing Wentworth into the slammer and spilling everything he knows to the D.A. (Actually, in this story, our hero is arrested and flung into a cell, but nothing that simple will slow him down for long.) And it's not only some fans who suspect that Richard Wentworth has taken a few steps over the perimeter of sanity. After fighting with Kirkpatrick, he screams at a taxi driver taking him home to go faster and faster, and as he rushes away "laughing with a cracked strain in his voice", the taxi driver mumbles, "Jeez, the guy's nuts!" For the next two hours, Wentworth plays wild, hysterical music on his violin with his servants Ram Singh and Jenkyns watch and worry. ("The music spoke of a mind on the verge - the verge of...") Then he calms down and goes back into action as if nothing had happened. This was in 1933, and he had a full decade of this sort of thing ahead of him. And for those who think that strong, competent women in adventure fiction are something recent, all I can say is that they haven't read the classic pulps. From Pat Savage to Nellie Gray to Jirel, there were plenty of feisty heroines in the 1930s. In this story, the wealthy debutante Nita Van Sloan charges out after the villain who has shot at her. On horseback, her dog Apollo leading the chase, she goes right after the mastermind with murder in her heart and an automatic in her pocket. She also takes the controls of a small plane in a dogfight with a military craft, performing perfect manuevers while Wentworth leans out the window with his Tommy gun. Go, Nita! (And like her bronze colleague in the crimefighting field, she ends up in jodhpurs and boots, with a silk shirt in ruined tatters... must come with the territory.)

EMPIRE OF DOOM (May 21, 2005) This February 1934 story gets off to a strong start. Deep in the snowy forests of northern Michigan, a bearded trapper is trudging warily through the drifts when a rifle shot drops him in his tracks. As the gunman emerges and comes closer, the trapper rolls over suddenly and fires his pistol twice. It's the rifleman's turn to fall to the ground, but he actually is dead, shot between the eyes while the trapper's backpack was stuffed with raw silk as a precaution (silk being dense enough to stop a bullet). What exactly is going on here? Some kind of feud or private grudge match? Not on your life. Striding up to the downed assassin, the bearded trapper pulls out an elegant black and platinum cigarette lighter and fixes a hideous crimson symbol on the dead man's forehead. Yep, it's the Spider, all right. Richard Wentworth has come to this frozen wilderness to rescue Cather, a friend of Professor Brownlee (the genius who makes all those wonderful gadgets for Wentworth). It seems this Professor Cather had made a discovery of great scientific importance, but one which could also be put to destructive use. And so a new Spider adventure is underway... The menace this time around is a type of poison gas, a rapidly-speading viscous green vapor that kills within seconds and leaves its victims' bodies contorted with agony. Just to add insult to injury, the dreadful stuff has another effect: "The gas had eaten huge areas of the flesh completely away, and what remained what a sickly greenish hue!" Ickk. Thanks, Professor Cather, just what the world needed. (Brownlee later remarks that this deadly gas seems to be "an offshoot of an experiment in synthetic perfumes"... just as well it didn't go into production, it would give Valentine's Day sales a real downturn.) Sure enough, the gas finds its way into exactly the wrong hands. Soon, Jonathan Love, the tyrant industrialist who owns half a dozen large companies in the area, receives a threatening note. Either he pays protection money of two million dollars, or the company town of Elkhorn will be wiped out and all five thousand workers (and their families) will die. The note is signed with a gruesome drawing of a brutal, clutching green hand. And this is only the beginning of the horror, as Love not only refuses to co-operate with Wentworth, he definitely has a shady side. At one point, Wentworth informs the local police chief that he is in fact a Lieutenant in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and offers to show his credentials. I think he's bluffing, to be honest.. since when did the FBI have military ranks like Lieutenant? And how would an amateur criminologist, no matter how gifted, be given such a rank without joining the organization? ("I hold just such an honorary commission," a deep cultured voice says. Quiet, Doc.) We learn a few incidental facts about the characters. Nita is remembered by a classmate from when she was a college senior (and presumably graduated). Wentworth is five feet eleven inches tall. At this point, he is still heavily into the violin and he carries his sword cane with the long amber handle. The unloveable get-up of the fanged hunchback Tito Calliepi will not be devised until the next month's story, and Wentworth still carries a simple black mask (with a veil) to wear as the Spider. This is also the first time I remember seeing what Professor Bownlee looks like: a small, excitable man with jet black eyes, a high forehead, and a greying Van Dyke and mustache. All the elements of the classic Spider stories to come have not quite gelled into place, but strong samples of them are already here. "Always the battle between love and duty, between his love for Nita and the man who had been like a father to him, and the Spider's crusade against the Green Hand. It was two lives against the thousands who would die in Cleveland..." The internal conflict which will torment Wentworth for the next nine years are starting to gnaw at him. There are the nightmarish scenes of a city under attack, people stampeding in panic as a horrible threat mows them down (""A green river of death, the flesh-eating gas of the Green Hand, flowed through the streets, washed the windows of second stories and crawled on.") which we will see many times again. Then there's the way a man is built up in the public eye as a saviour of the people, allegedly someone who can stop the menace but actually a pawn of the real mastermind. (The best example of this is in MACHINE GUNS OVER THE WHITE HOUSE.) I have to admit I can't find the spot in the Constitution where it says the president's Cabinet has the authority to declare a person Dictator of the United States, no matter what the provocation, and it's odd that the President himself would remain in office with a Dictator appointed. EMPIRE OF DOOM also has an example of the greatest weakness of the typical mastermind's way of thinking. With Wentworth, Nita van Sloan and Professor Brownlee helpless prisoners, the so-called evil genius doesn't simply shoot each of them in the back of the head as any real gangster would. Nope, he rigs up an elaborate Rube Goldberg arrangement where a clock striking will trigger a rifle which will break a tube of the green gas which will kill the three prisoners. And he sets it for half an hour, just to make sure our heroes have plenty of time to sweat over coming up with a way to escape. Good thinking there. Finally, there is a tantalizing reference to the origin of the Spider. Discussing the fact that Professor Brownlee had been brought up on criminal charges while teaching at Dunherst University, someone remarks that "the charges were never proved because the chief witness against Brownlee was murdered. The murderer traced the design of a spider on his forehead in his victim's own blood!" Wentworth reflects to himself that this is true; the charges against Brownlee were false, brought by a jealous and envious colleague, and "... that death had marked the birth of the Spider, scourge of the Underworld, gallant knight of Justice."

SERPENT OF DESTRUCTION (Jan 27, 2007) It's odd to read one of the earlier Spiders (this one is from April 1934) after careening through some of the demented epics that followed. When you're used to crooks in giant armored suits and hordes of rabid dogs set loose and an army of migrating Neanderthals, not to mention a daily body count running into many thousands – well, SERPENT OF DESTRUCTION seems a bit mundane. Still, even the most minor case for Richard Wentworth is something that would be the crowning achievement for your typical detective or vigilante. One thing that struck me was just how close the Spider was originally intended to resemble the Shadow. From the original pulp cover (which shows a man's hand wearing a signet ring with a spider insignia rather than the girasol) to all the references like "He merged with the night, a dark moving shadow amid blackness" and "the shadow that was the Spider crept on...", it's fairly blatant. In the opening scenes, we follow a man in a soft black hat and full-length black cloak sneaking around investigating a mystery. Later on, there are mentions of the Spider's flat mocking triumphant laughter (so many mentions that it seems forced). Except for the fact that this crimefighter wears a skirted mask rather than a scarf around the lower half of his face, someone in 1934 who was waiting at the newsstand for the next issue of THE SHADOW to come out would likely skim through THE SPIDER and give it a shot. But fear not. Pounding the typewriter behind the house name "Grant Stockbridge" (sounds like a cover artist for THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, eh?) is the wild genius of Norvell Page. The differences are evident and will become more so. Instead of an enigmatic figure living under an alias, whose thoughts remain opaque, we readers are close to Richard Wentworth. We follow what he feels and thinks, and we see how stressed and battered he becomes in his crusade. What's more, while Wentworth is passionately in love with Nita and devoted to his friends, his dedication to crimefighting usually puts him through Hell as he has to risk their lives as well as his own. This time, New York City is threatened with a cocaine epidemic. So what else is new? No, seriously, it's a carefully planned campaign to get as many citizens hooked on dope as possible. There's even a slogan, "It's smart to be dopey." With the repeal of Prohibition and the collapse of the bathtub gin market, mobsters need a new source of income. (Some heroin seems to be in the trade as well, as one character asks for "the needle which brings forgetfulness.") The racket is so successful that packets of dope start bearing trade names like "Snowballs" and "Eskimo's Kiss." ("White Horse" was already taken.) Behind all this harmfulness is the Bloody Serpent, who always appears with a hat pulled low and his face wrapped in a white silk scarf to disguise himself. Knowing the rules in the Manual For Criminal Masterminds, he also appears during the story in his true identity so that the hero has a chance for some observation and deduction. (What fun would it be if the hero yanked off the fiend's mask on the last page and muttered, "Nope, never seen 'em before?") He also obligingly wears a glass ring in the shape of a coiled serpent. (One of the requirements for Mastermindhood is to provide a token for the hero to swipe so he can infiltrate the organization.) All the usual cast are here: Nita van Sloan, Joe Ronald Jackson, Ram Singh (still a Hindu) and Commissioner Kirkpatrick. Nita gets abducted (not for the last time) and addicted to dope; Kirkpatrick helps with an ambush that kills twenty gangsters. Two of the regulars who will be missed after they drop out of the saga are Apollo, the loyal Great Dane (who's a good boy? Yes, you are. Now go rip that gunman's throat out) and Professor Brownlee. I like the white-goateed old Prof, he's Q to Wentworth's Bond. If you need a snug booth of bulletproof glass with armholes to shoot through or a dozen tiny radio speakers in a hurry, he's the man to see. Brownlee provides Wentworth with a cane that not only imprints the dreaded Spider insignia with its tip, it injects a concentrated dose of black widow venom (guaranteed to kill within an agonizing twenty-four hours). Aside from the usual large-scale manslaughter (Wentworth seems particularly fond of using bottles of nitroglycerine these days), there are plenty of interesting little tidbits. "I grant you that you and I believe narcotics bad for people. But remember that before prohibition, there was the same sort of talk about liquor... Did you know there is an organization called the Association for Repeal of the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act?" says one character. "And they're saying the same things the anti-prohibition crowd said. That you can't enforce the law, that it creates graft and crime, that it's an infringement on personal liberty. They want narcotics sold like liquor. They point out the revenue to be derived from taxing it." But you can't mislead Richard Wentworth with that pro-cocaine talk. (Good thing Sherlock Holmes wasn't called in on this, eh?) He is well aware that the white powder degrades people so badly that they can become hemophiles; a young woman is arrested when she's caught slicing up a live dog with a knife because "she wanted to see the blood..." Imagine how many poor canines must have been killed in discos during the 1970s! I'll never listen to the Bee Gees again! Again, popular music comes in for a few digs. "The dancing was continuous and, rhythmed by a Negro orchestra, jerkily sensuous." And "from above came the throb and thump of a rhythm that dragged the soul back thousands of years, back to the deeps of of the African jungle,to drums of human skin rubbed by frenzied hands..." (Oh come on, it's just Cab Calloway singing "St James Infirmary – good thing Wentworth didn't live to see hip hop.) The Spider's gruesome get-up as Tito Caliepi, the twisted, straggle-haired old man (complete with vampire fangs) is for once given no respect. A gangster (himself a stereotype called Big Mack Harrigan) dismissed the unsavory looking intruder as "You ornery hunch-backed old wop!" (He soon learns to be more polite to deformed street musicians, of course.) As much as I enjoy Norvell Page's hectic imaginative writing, there always seem to be a few points in the plotting that you'd think an editor might raise an eyebrow over. Nita is abducted and Wentworth receives a photo of her obviously wired up on coke; other users require stays in sanitariums to recover but Nita just pops up at the end, apparently just fine. Wellll, she was a Vassar graduate and you know college girls, so maybe she just chuckled as the Bloody Serpent's men prepared the needle. Also, at some point the evil organization has learned Wentworth is the Spider and promptly shoots up a Fourth Avenue cigar store where he's making a phone call while in disguise. How they knew he was there is beyond me. At one point, Wentworth sends a large crowd of crooks off to the police and they certainly know he's the Spider, but this doesn't seem to be any concern to him. With the deadline breathing down his neck and other stories ready to be started, I don't think Page went over his manuscripts line by line, polishing and revising looking for inconsistencies in the knowledge that his stories would still be read seventy years later.

CITADEL OF HELL (March 25, 2005) I had to take a little nap after plowing through this one from March 1934. Honestly, CITADEL OF HELL is so worked-up and overheated that it clearly marks the beginning of the classic Spider period. This is the first story in the series where Manhattan is going up in flames, the population is seized with mass hysteria, starvation and riots are threatening the nation. It won't be the last time a Spider story has NYC and the United States itself thrashed within inches of its life, either. A conspiracy using firebombs is systematically burning warehouses and factories supplying food - although we mostly follow the carnage in New York, it's going on elsewhere in the country as well. ("Wheat fields in the West had been swept by consuming flames; grain elevators along the Great Lakes; Chicago stock yards had been laid waste, thousands of cattle destroyed...") Prices for staple items go through the roof, rationing is imposed, stores and restaurants are turning desperate starving people away. And this is during the darkest days of the Depression, remember, when most folks already had a hard enough time surviving without the Food Destroyers gang making things worse. Are the police and FBI any help? Are you kidding? Unless it was in a title specifically devoted to G-Men or police gangbusters, the authorities in the pulp universe typically were of no use. Our only hope lay in bold solitary men who put on slouch hats and cloaks and girasol rings, or who turned their strange gold-flecked eyes in stern bronze faces to the crises. Here, we see one of the most unsavory-looking of all heroes take up the challenge. Meet an elderly Italian street violinist, with a noticeable hunchback, lanky black hair falling over a raptor-like beaky face, a black cape and battered hat... and fangs. (What?!) Yes, this is the first appearance of Tito Caliepi, the gruesome vampirish guise by which the Spider will best be known. Naturally, our hero doesn't normally look like Lon Chaney Sr on a bad day. As his own self, Richard Wentworth is your typical tall, athletic playboy with crisp grey eyes and impeccable tailored suits. But the Spider's public persona is something else. The grotesque Tito Caliepi only appeared on a handful of the magazine's covers. Usually, the Spider was depicted pretty much like the Shadow, but with a simple domino mask instead of that big honker of a nose the Shadow sported. In this story, Wentworth takes the celluloid fangs out in the dark and gouges a crook's hand with them (a crimefighter with a reputation for biting his foe, that's something new.) Norvell W. Page (writing as "Grant Stockbridge") comes into his own here. Despite the way the story goes eagerly overboard and stays there (at one point, the Spider is using a commandeered city bus to ram cars filled with gangsters into each other), Page still manages to work in a genuine subplot involved a innocent person's death which the Spider is falsely accused of (and what really happened). There are many creative moments, such as when Wentworth is about to be examined for a head wound he has covered with make-up and he comes up with an audacious way of wriggling out of it. Still, there is that well-known Page disregard for continuity already showing up. Wentworth is shot in the left shoulder early on, and much is made of the damage done, the wound being infected and our hero spending three weeks in feverish delirium. Okay so far. Then, toward the end, the Spider is shot AGAIN in the same shoulder and he dismisses it at as a minor nuisance. He keeps talking and explains the plot twists between finally fainting. I'm surprised there's anything left of that shoulder other than bone fragments and suet. (What IS it with adventure heroes and being shot in the left shoulder? Do they have a bullet magnet in there or something?) An important part of the story takes place at the top of the Empire State Building, in the stairway leading up to the mooring mast. This must have been during the week that Doc Savage and his crew were in Chile tackling the Blue Meteor and Mo-Gwei. Even if the man of bronze had been locked in his lab working on a cure for papercuts, he surely would have noticed two flaming human bodies plummeting past to the street below. Richard Wentworth has nerve chasing his quarry up past the 86th floor, anyway, considering the Doc Savage gimmicks he's appropriated. In THE CITADEL OF HELL, the Spider uses more gadgets than usual. (Professor Brownlee was putting in overtime.) In addition to the usual silk cord for climbing skyscrapers, he has taken to carrying a sword cane and dipping the blade in a vile of narcotic so a single cut knocks an opponent out. (Ham Brooks is sputtering with outrage at this trademark infringement.) A neat contraption is his pistol with a timer, set to fire a blank cartridge after he tosses it on the floor... a very useful distraction when being disarmed by thugs. Then there's the odd "Spider Ring" business. We're dealing here with (let's face it) a self-appointed vigilante who murders dozens of criminals every adventure, and who is thought of by the public as either a deranged serial killer or a gangster himself trying to eliminate the competition. Yet the Spider has a devoted following of young boys who think he's "an all-round swell guy". An ad in the magazine excitedly explains how by sending in just twenty-five cents, you too can wear a white metal ring bearing an enamel insignia of a red spider on a black field. Join the "Spider League For Crime Prevention!" (But please, content yourself with reporting crimes to the proper authorities and don't start shooting suspected crooks between the eyes yourself!) In the story itself, Wentworth gives a present of a signet ring (described as both plain gold and platinum) on which he has impressed his hideous Spider symbol,to a young lad named Timothy Walsh. This is the beginning of the Spider fan club. Nita Van Sloan is promptly arrested at the beginning of the story and sits out most of the page count in the slammer. Sorry, Nita. On the other hand, we do get to see Professor Brownlee give sanctuary to the badly wounded Spider for a month, while our hero recuperates from a police bullet. It's Brownlee who provides the Spider with gadgets like a violin which sprays tear gas and those devilishly clever trick cigarette lighters which hold the Spider seals Kirkpatrick just cannot find. Commissioner Kirkpatrick and Richard Wentworth have the most nerve-wracking gruelling relationship since my first marriage. The Commissioner knows darn well Wentworth is the Spider but since that vigilante is so useful in fighting these evil masterminds, he's willing to hold back until overwhelming evidence slaps him right in the face. Two close friends working together, with one putting a "shoot on sight" death warrant on the other every month... not a comfortable arrangement, yet these two kept it up for ten years.